


Boundaries

by speccygeekgrrl



Series: even the mistakes aren't really mistakes at all [6]
Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Devotion, Dreams, Gen, Slow Burn, baby mad scientist, late nights with too many serious thoughts in them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 14:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10743918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: It's important for Max to know what he can and can't do. Some of the limits he sets for himself, and some of them Kinga sets for him, and that's how he knows his place in the world... even if he aspires to more.





	Boundaries

**Author's Note:**

> Immediately follows "To the Moon (and Back)". I'm sorry I just love his devotion to her so so so much! Poor Max.

Max wanted to be helpful. He really did. And he tried to the best of his ability. However, what he thought was helpful and what Kinga thought was helpful weren't always the same things.

"Is that Gary Busey or an ugly pod person version of him?" he asked, and she turned to fix him with a disapproving frown.

"Are you _riffing_? We don't do the riffing. The test subject and the junkyard bots do the riffing."

"Okay, but the test subject hasn't been found, neither have the bots, and we're the ones sitting here watching this terrible movie. If you expect me to watch it without making fun of it, I'd rather not watch it at all." Her scowl deepened, and he wondered what the big deal was. Didn't everyone make fun of bad movies now? Wasn't that why Kinga thought she could leverage the brand back into media dominance? "Sorry. I didn't realize it would offend you," he said, trying to rein in the sarcasm.

"Whatever... just don't do it again," she muttered, but she rearranged herself from slumped against his shoulder to leaning on the arm of the couch, no longer touching him. That was a more effective punishment than catching the edge of her sharp tongue, but even that was dulled right now through her bright green appletini haze. He chewed on his lip and split his attention between the movie and the obviously exhausted woman at the other end of the couch. 

"We could watch something that doesn't suck," he offered hopefully, and she flicked her fingers as if to shoo away a bug.

"Research. Have to build our arsenal."

"Yeah, but aren't we just punishing ourselves by watching them? At least the test subject gets to vent. If we're just straight-up watching it aren't we being worse to ourselves than we will be to whoever we catch?" She turned half-lidded eyes on him and he swallowed against what he knew was annoyance but looked like seduction.

"Fine. Make fun of it. But you aren't funny." 

"That hurts, Kinga."

"Deal with it," she said, and yawned. "This is a really terrible one though. I don't think we have to finish it to add it to our list."

"What list?"

"This list." She pulled out her notebook, flipped to the back of it, and wrote the name of the movie at the top of the penultimate page. "There. Go ahead, change the channel." He started flipping through channels, but by the time he found something she'd dozed off. Well, he couldn't leave her there or she'd be a terror in the morning with a crick in her neck. He nudged her gently.

"You should go lie down," he said. She cracked one eye open and made a grumbly sound, and he smiled. "Seriously. You want to borrow a t-shirt or something? You probably shouldn't sleep in that nice dress."

"I'll just steal something out of your drawer," she mumbled, getting to her feet. "Yeah. Tired."

"Go to bed then." After she went into the bedroom, he sat on his couch and looked around, categorizing the flotsam and jetsam of her presence in his life. Purse on the coffee table, high heeled shoes at the corner of the couch, jacket hung by the door. The cup she preferred, also on the coffee table, marked with a crimson lipstick kiss in a color that suited her all too well. Why she'd refreshed it after the restaurant he had no idea. It wasn't like she ever had to go out of her way to impress him.

The dent in the wall by the front door where she'd kicked it after she flunked her first sociology exam, while complaining about the uselessness of gen eds. He'd enjoyed the sociology classes he'd taken, but she had no patience for it. The little dachshund figurine she'd given him for his thirtieth birthday, how privately hilarious she'd found it when he flinched when he opened it, how he'd defiantly put it in a place of pride in front of the TV just to prove it didn't bother him. It did bother him, he couldn't stand little dogs any more, but he was mildly amazed that she'd remembered something from so long ago to torture him with. At least she hadn't attached additional heads to it.

Well. The history of their families being what it was, he couldn't say that he hadn't expected a moderate amount of emotional torment. He'd been under the misapprehension that he could at least avoid the torment of love, but that had been one of the dumber ideas he'd ever had in his life. She was probably going to torture him in a thousand different ways, and he was either too dumb or too proud or too desperate to be needed to complain about any individual instance, so why would she ever stop?

Did he even really want her to stop? He wasn't sure. His dreams were all wispy threads in the morning, but he had the impression when he woke sometimes that she might have done something nice for him, locked away in his unconscious mind where it couldn't do anything except now and then send a twinge through him wishing she'd be a little nicer and feeling like she might have been at some point. He couldn't remember her doing anything nice that hadn't been double-edged: little fragments of affection with ulterior motives, compliments that he only later realized were backhanded. 

And yet... here he was on his couch again while she slept in his bed. He never complained about ceding the bedroom to her, and these late nights happened pretty regularly. He'd gotten a more comfortable couch shortly after he realized how often this would be happening, and it had definitely been a worthwhile investment. _Why don't I ever make her sleep on the couch?_ he wondered idly, paying no attention to the TV he'd left on but watching the flicker of lights on the ceiling as scenes changed and commercial breaks cut in. _This is my place, after all._ But no. This apartment might be his place physically, but his place cosmically had been determined long before he ever found momentary independence from his destiny, and he'd returned to it with some idea of what he was going into. Not a complete idea, and not an entirely correct idea, but at least he knew what to call it.

He was Kinga's second banana. He was her first line of support, the barrier between her fragile ego and erratic brilliance and the harsh reality of a world faced alone. He was a sounding board when she vented her crazy ideas, a punching bag when all she could do was lash out in frustration, a pillow when she finally ran out of whatever insane righteous fury motivated her most of the time. He was, given her grandmother's hands-off approach to family, all she had, really. 

He was _necessary_. And if that wasn't everything he wanted, at least it was enough to keep him at her side.

"Max..." He blinked and found the room flooded with morning light, Kinga leaning over the back of the couch with her hair falling around her face, and he smiled sleepily. What had he been dreaming about? He could never remember when he was woken up, only sometimes when he woke up of his own volition. "Where'd you put the aspirin?"

"Uh... should be where it always is," he mumbled, and she shook her head slowly, as if trying not to jostle her brain.

"It's not there."

"No? Um..." He closed his eyes again to think and they snapped open again when she tapped his cheek.

"Don't go back to sleep, my head hurts."

"I wasn't," he said, sitting up to prove it. "I'm trying to remember. If it's not there then it's..." He trailed off, staring into the kitchen. It was in the recycling bin because it was empty. "Damn, I ran out."

"Seriously? Ugh!" She folded her arms on the back of the couch and dropped her head onto them with a little groan of disappointment. "Tylenol? Willow bark tea? A gun to put me out of my misery?"

"That's a bit dramatic, don't you think?"

"I can't think. My brain is being squeezed."

"Here, you go back in the dark room, I'll get you something to drink." She kept a hand over her eyes when she turned around, and he rubbed the sleep out of his own eyes, trying to pull on the single thread of dream he could still feel and sighing as it dissolved.

The microwave clock read 6:11. Wow, her head must have been killing her to wake her up this early. He pulled a bottle of gatorade out of the fridge and brought it to her. She didn't open her eyes, just wrapped her hand around the bottle when he tapped it and brought it to rest against her forehead. 

"I'm going to see what I have in the medicine cabinet," he said softly, and she waved her other hand at him. Half the stuff in the cabinet was expired, but the bottle of Tylenol wedged behind the antihistamines was only a couple of months past the date. Good enough. He shook a couple out in his hand and returned to find her slowly sipping from the bottle. "Here you go." 

She swallowed both pills and sighed, then looked up at him. "You're the best, Max."

"I try," he said modestly, internally screaming with joy at the recognition. "You stay here until you feel better, I'm going to catch a few more Zs." She caught his hand before he could turn away and he paused, wide-eyed. 

"Thanks," she added, very quietly. "For everything."

"You're very welcome." The urge to bend and kiss her forehead was strong. He gently detached his hand from hers and made a strategic retreat into the living room. 

Go figure. She'd always been good at playing sweet when he cared for her in pain, ever since she was little; how many times had she hugged him after he tended a scraped knee or a stubbed toe, then run off to destroy something he liked? It had been more than a few. "That's just the way they are," his dad had told him, and Max had accepted it as truth: no action without reaction, no kindness without cruelty. No way to win, unless you counted breaking even as winning.

He did, of course. It was the only way to feel like he ever won. 

He flopped back down on the couch and tried to bury his face between the back and the seat cushion to block out the sunlight. It wasn't really effective, but he was tired enough that it didn't matter, falling into a sort of half-doze, aware on some level that he was still slightly conscious even as he drifted into a dream.

She looked down at him from her perch on the sill of the window of his third-story apartment, feet kicking idly against the brick of the wall. "I'm going to jump," she said, and he shook his head.

"Why would you jump? What's the point?"

"So you can catch me, dumbass." Oh. Of course. He tried to position himself under the window, held out his arms expectantly. She jumped, laughing like a madwoman, and before she got anywhere near him she snapped out brilliant emerald wings and swooped away. All he could do was stand and stare as she flew away from him on hummingbird wings, feeling a stab of frustration that she could always soar away from him, but he was stuck here on the ground like every other sucker in the world.

He shifted restlessly on the couch, mind struggling against this recurring but easily forgotten dream. No. Why should he be earthbound? Wasn't he fit to follow her anywhere she needed to go? Even to the moon, if that was what she intended.

In the dream he climbed the stairs to his apartment, clambered out onto the windowsill, held his breath, and leaped. For a moment he fell... and then he flew, wings carrying him into the sky after her. He glanced back to find broad white and black wings, gull wings, and that seemed fitting. Nothing flashy or fancy, but dependable. He could fly anywhere she could with wings like those, and he did, for the first time breaking the cycle of this dream he'd had so many times before. She laughed when he caught up to her, laughed and laughed...

When he opened his eyes again, he found her hovering over him much the same way she'd done the first time he woke up, except she was giggling. "You twitch in your sleep. Like a puppy chasing rabbits in its dreams."

"I wasn't chasing rabbits," he said. "I was... I was flying, I think."

"Yeah? I thought you didn't like flying."

"Not like that." He shook his head, sitting up and looking around. "What time is it?"

"Almost eleven thirty. Are you hungry? I'm hungry." She didn't look like she was in pain any more, that was good. She looked... she looked... His brain locked up, not quite able to process the sight of Kinga wearing his favorite black t-shirt, going totally blue-screen-of-death when he saw the hem of the shirt barely covering her thighs. She arched a brow at him, then rolled her eyes. "Hello? Earth to Max. Come in, Max."

"Uh-- wha?"

"Let's go get brunch," she said, back in boss mode. "I desperately need bacon. At least six pieces of bacon." She didn't wait for him to agree, just went back into the bedroom to change. He blinked when she closed the door behind her, coming back to himself with a shake of his head.

That was dangerous. Every other time she'd borrowed clothes to crash there, she'd changed back into her own before he saw her again. He wasn't sure if what just happened had been a reward or just a more refined form of torture. Or both. Probably both. That was her nature, after all.

Something twinged his memory when he saw the flock of seagulls hanging out in the diner parking lot, but... no, it was gone. It couldn't have been that important.


End file.
